Cartilage and Skin Read Online Free PDF

this morning I had experienced my last bout with anxiety that I would have in my life. The demons had fled; the ugly swine had drowned themselves. Since puberty, I’d suffered random and unexplainable panic attacks. Then all at once, at my kitchen sink, something deep in my brain realigned, and I knew that the attacks were gone.
    Nevertheless, I waited for the fiendish swine to return. I was dimly aware that my anticipation itself could have reopened the door and ushered the demons back in: Anticipation could have given way to brooding, and then brooding to repossession. Yet I was saved by another force, sort of distracted by a desire to revel in myself, to open up and unleash myself, but I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do or how to go about doing it. Apparently, there were more demons inside of me than a phantom father and a hyper-refined sense of chastity.
    After all, a person who lives in his mind has trouble living in his body. It becomes an absurdity to him because he doesn’t know what to do with it. There is even the chance that it can become grotesque. He knows that it is located in the world, that it moves in time and space, and that it is, at least, a receptacle for his mind, to say nothing of his soul. The body is at the mercy of innumerable necessities, from water and food to atmospheric pressure and the exact degree of tilt to the earth’s axis. The irony is that while the body is the most empirically known part of man—because it bruises easily, tastes fruit, and has orgasms—it is the lesser part. Given a universe of necessities, the body remains helplessly outside of a person’s actual control. Perhaps it is for this reason that the collective unconscious of the human race has invented the soul—that part of us that slips beyond the reach of the world. We have no idea what a soul is or how it is contained in a body. This ignorance is essential because the moment we locate the soul is the moment we lose it, as well as our humanity. Like Diogenes the Cynic, we can take our business outside and crap in the street. All the old verities and truths of the heart won’t even be around for “when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening,” because man will neither endure nor prevail; his insides—that which makes him man—have been sucked out and thrown away. Of course, if we are going to have a soul, why not say that it is made up of stuff that is impervious to the world, and while we are at it, why not add that its true home is beyond the world? In the meantime, we can abhor our bodies like good Neo-Platonists or squat like heavy rocks in a Giotto painting, as we wait to get to our eternal home, back to the real and true ground of our being. Or like good Americans, we can apprehend our souls just enough to give us a sense of hope and a cozy feeling in our hearts. Unfortunately, in this sense, those of us without a soul are homeless. At best, our body becomes a piece of equipment, and whatever we do with it has no consequence on any soul. After a while, we may wonder why do anything with the body at all, as all the delights of sensation begin to lose their thrill—why should a magician keep repeating the same old trick once it’s been figured out? And it is a trick, isn’t it, a gross trick played on us by nature, that we should be so dependent upon and mingled with such a helpless and futile thing as flesh? Once a person begins to retreat into his mind, he might find that it is a mansion with many rooms, and like any good homeowner, he will want to warm them all and turn on all the lights, one by one, until his mind has far outgrown the confines of his gelatinous brain and bony skull.
    But there is something else he might find. Worse than the possibility that the content of his thoughts has no partner in reality, he might find that his mind is all potentiality, like